Epilady-in-waiting 

Posted 2:44 PM by Sean
Anybody want to chip in on getting Ben Weber a lifetime's supply of depilatories? Since shaving his head and beard on Tuesday, Weber's had two good appearances - a five-pitch inning on Tuesday night, and last night's 2+ innings of work in which he did give up an earned run. Weber pitched very well in the sixth, starting that inning in relief of Bartolo Colon, looked like he was struggling a bit in the seventh, and was out of gas in the eighth, when he was lifted in favor of Frankie Rodriguez. I was a little surprised to see Weber start the eighth, but the game wasn't in a save situation and doubless Scioscia didn't want to use Rodriguez for more than one inning to keep him available throughout this weekend's series with Oakland. Once Weber gave up the run, it became a question of getting the game to Percival, so Rodriguez came in, pitched like he does, and - for once - Percival got a relatively uneventful save. Sure, the tying run came to the plate, but only once. For Percival, that's downright sedate.

In any event, if Weber is truly returning to form, it's a big lift. The bullpen was thought to be the one area that didn't need changing in the off-season, but the fact remains that Weber and Donnelly both suddenly bloomed into effective relievers, and you have to keep an eye on guys like that. Weber's 34 now, and he certainly wouldn't be the first guy to have a couple of excellent years in his early thirties, only to fall of the face of the Earth. At 32, Donnelly's a slightly safer bet, but neither is automatic.

The Rangers did an excellent job of wearing Colon down, to the point where he threw 100 pitches in five innings of work and still only surrendered three runs. He pretty clearly didn't have his good stuff last night - I don't think I saw him throw that little tailing fastball he has at all (or maybe it just didn't tail), and only 60 of those 100 pitches were strikes. His velocity jumped around a lot on the fastball, from the low nineties to 99 mph, if the radar gun is to be believed. Still, that's what an ace does - even when he doesn't have his good stuff, he keeps his team in the game. Since the offense was able to put six up early, he was able to compensate by going after hitters, even when men were on base.

It was nice to see the offense get geared up again, even if it only lasted a few innings. Troy Glaus hit a no-doubter, and I'll say it again - he's going to have a monster season. He looks so much better at the plate than he did last year - I don't know if it's the eye surgery, the shoulder rehab, or a new brand of athletic supporter, but right now I'd be more afraid of him than of Guerrero if I was an AL pitcher. Garret Anderson and Tim Salmon both sat last night, GA because of back problems and Salmon due to a sore knee, but Chone Figgins and Jeff DaVanon stepped in nicely. DaVanon went 2 for 3 with a (probably fan-assisted) home run, while Figgins...

...well, Figgins poses something of a quandary. He does so many things that just seem dumb, like committing a two-base error by not getting in front of a ball, like last night, or executing a hit and run with his head down and getting caught off first on a line drive, like a few nights ago. But he's also clearly got some exceptional skills, most of which stem from his incredible speed. He tripled last night, and made it to third in what may have been the fastest time I've ever seen. He steals bases, obviously, but also uses his speed in the outfield; three batters after that two-base error he robbed Adrian Gonzalez of a double hit nearly to the wall (and took a somewhat, um, indirect route to the ball, I might add). He's 26, and likely entering the prime of his career. While the Angels have something of a logjam in the outfield, Figgins may have the inside track to replace Eckstein at short (and at the top of the batting order) next year, and could move back to center if the Angels let Jose Guillen walk after 2005 (with Anderson moving back to left). I suspect that Figgins's mistakes are at least partially due to lack of playing time, but he'll be an interesting one to watch as the season progresses.

Thanks 

Posted 11:49 AM by Sean
Yesterday was the highest-traffic day in the history of this blog. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and to everyone who linked my post about Ramon Ortiz.

This blog does not enhance drug use, it just promotes it 

Posted 11:43 AM by Sean
There's a fairly intriguing article in today's L.A. Times by Bill Plaschke (hey, and Darin Erstad put good wood on a breaking ball last night!) about Angels' broadcaster Rex Hudler's life after his bust for marijuana possession last August.

Here's what I find most interesting:

For example, for the first time since he was a senior in high school, he no longer smokes marijuana.

Hudler says he never smoked much, rarely on the road, never before games, and would sometimes go an entire season without smoking. But during his 20-year pro career and five-year broadcasting stint with the Angels, he said dope was always somewhere in the background, even if only for a few tokes at night to help him sleep.

"It made me feel good, it relaxed me," he said. "It was easy, there was no real side effect. I knew it was wrong, but I liked it."

and

This work involves far more than 130 broadcasts. Hudler is on the front lines in the stadium concourses and the community.

He does so much charity work — particularly for Down syndrome, which afflicts his son Cade — that ordering him to do community service is like telling him to brush his teeth.

He has such an old-fashioned relationship with fans that when he sees someone who doesn't look happy, he gives them a baseball.

So here's a guy who's been smoking dope since he was a senior in high school. He was never addicted - "would sometimes go an entire season without smoking," in fact. He became a major league baseball player for parts of 14 seasons, including a 1996 campaign in which he batted .311 in 302 at-bats. He became a fan favorite as an announcer, does extensive charity work, is a devoted family man, and maintains a permanent optimism and energy.

See how marijuana will ruin your life?

I know, I know, off topic...

Posted 2:26 PM by Sean
No big update today, just a quick congratulations to John Lackey for putting people on notice that he'd like to be thought of as part of the top 4/5ths of the rotation, rather than part of the bottom 2/5ths. There's really not much to complain about your number four guy going six and two thirds against an offense like Texas's and giving up only three runs - it's surely not Lackey's fault that no one in the lineup could drive in runs against R.A. Dickey. Funnily, Texas appears to have two guys on their team with that name; the other one gave up nine earned runs in four and two-thirds innings to Oakland a few games ago, so I guess he'd better watch out he doesn't get sent back to the minors, huh?

Dumb jokes aside, I look at the guys in the Angels lineup, and I can't really bring myself to think that their current offensive woes are anything more than a temporary thing. This is still the club that absolutely destroyed the Mariners on opening weekend, and I think we'll probably start seeing that again in the near future.

...and the rose goes in front, big guy 

Posted 8:54 AM by Sean
Breaking news! Slate publishes a shocking revelation: the Angels' undervisors - the portion of the cap on the bottom of the brim - is black, rather than gray, the preferred choice of the other 29 major league teams!

More updates on this extremely important breaking news as developments warrant!

Wheels in motion 

Posted 12:51 PM by Sean
I've been thinking a lot this morning about what, if anything, a baseball team owes its fans. And it's a hard call - it's tough to say that the fans aren't owed something, some measure of respect for sticking out the tough times, ponying up cash for tickets, paying out in frustration and broken hearts over the years. At the same time, though, fans are fans for their own reasons - because rooting for a particular team fulfills in them some need to associate, or because they just like seeing a game played at its highest level. The relationship is symbiotic; to that extent neither side owes the other anything. To be sure, the fans' willingness to stick by their team makes certain that ballplayers, and everyone else associated with a Major League Baseball team, are able to live a lot more comfortably than they would otherwise. But that's ultimately because the demand for ultra-talented ballplayers far exceeds supply. If, for example, baseball's pay scale underwent a radical revision overnight, and the highest-paid player made, say, a million dollars per year, how many of them would quit baseball to engage in some other profession? Ignore the obvious arguments about how so-and-so would quit out of protest to make more money in broadcasting or endorsements - those kinds of options are made possible only because they made so much money playing baseball already. The fact is that if fans suddenly stopped caring about baseball, and the average player's salary was more along the lines of a mechanic or a teacher, quite a few of them would still be taking the field. For some, that's because it's the only thing they know how to do really well, but most, I suspect, would do so because it's just a really good job. Sure, there's a lot of travel, and time away from your family. But you also get half the year off, and it's a game, for Christ's sake. Dolts wearing "Baseball is Life" shirts notwithstanding, it's a game. The greatest game ever invented, but a game.

But if a team doesn't owe a fan anything, precisely, it still relies on its fans to keep it competitive. Take the Montreal Expos, for example, who must perpetually discard its best players just to stay afloat financially, because they can't rely on their fan base to support them through the lean times, and they can't risk paying their good players without a guarantee of success. The business of baseball at the individual team level requires that the fan be kept happy.

Normally, what keeps the fan happy is the team accomplishing its goal: winning. But sometimes - hell, all the time, really - the mechanism for that accomplishment is, to a greater or lesser extent, a subject of contention. On one side we have the team, personified in various circumstances by the manager, coaches, general manager, owner, and others, who makes the ultimate decisions regarding strategy and tactics. On the other are various groups of fans, whose opinions shift in both nature and prominence. Since the decision-making function is held entirely by the former group (properly, of course, DWL), when there's a sufficiently large disagreement between the two the fans react in the only ways available to them. First, they voice their frustrations - either by booing, writing scathing letters to the editor of the local paper, or, now, blogging about it. If a team's fortunes are sufficiently bad for a sufficiently long time, however, and the fans are frustrated beyond endurance, some of them simply stop being fans. Like investors sick of watching a stock go into the tank - or Arte Moreno sick of watching Kevin Appier pitch - they cut their losses and move on to something else.

Like I said, the power to make short-term decisions on the level we're talking about is really one-sided. A determined manager will put that 0-for-24 righty in against left-handed relievers over and over again no matter how lustily the crowd boos, and there's nothing they can do about it except boo harder, or quit showing up for games. But, like all disagreements between parties where the decisions are being made by one side alone, a simple explanation can go a long way. Say you give your unemployed brother-in-law fifty grand to start a business marketing a meat-based tofu substitute called "Nofu." And say that after two months he's sold $6.50 worth of product, all to the Army for use in the Guantanamo Bay confinement camp. You'd be a little annoyed, right? But what if your brother-in-law showed you evidence that a new species of bean curd weevil was poised to wipe out traditional sources of tofu, and that everyone who loves the freakish texture and disturbing cubism of tofu will be forced to buy his product at a premium in a month?

Which brings me - Jesus, finally - to Ramon Ortiz.

I can't add a great deal to what?s being said on the other Angels blogs about Ortiz's performance last night. To say that it was terrible is true. To say that it was a vindication of my earlier comments about the importance of first-pitch strikes is also, sadly, true. But at this point, things have gone beyond recriminations about poor performances, or gratuitous credit-taking for pointing out the obvious. Ramon Ortiz made me feel something last night that I haven't experienced as a baseball fan in a long time. He made me feel embarrassed to be an Angels fan.

Let me make one thing clear before proceeding: I will always be an Angels fan, for so long as this franchise exists. Such is fate; this part of me was instilled when I was very young. There is no danger that I will stop caring about this team's fortunes. But Ramon Ortiz proved last night that there's still a part of me that remembers very well the days when John Farrell took the mound with some regularity, days that I was literally afraid to read the box scores. Oh, sure, there have been times since then that I've winced because of something or other (I mean, come on - Bengie Molina was thrown out at first last night on a ball the shortstop had fly out of his hand and fall to the ground; like one of the Rangers announcers said, Ichiro would have been on second base). But that kind of thing is transitory; this is a deep and abiding wound of the psyche. Ramon Ortiz, I'm being told, is the best we can throw out there.

Whether that's true or not is a subject of some discussion. Certainly the fans seem to have seen enough of him; my small but smart contingent of colleagues in the Angels blogosphere are united in their desire to see Ortiz replaced in the rotation with Kevin Gregg, Scot Shields, or Aaron Sele. A thread on the Angels' web site's message boards, started by someone defending Ortiz, has drawn only derisive responses from the denizens thereof. And most telling of all, the fans last night were booing Ortiz, and booing him loudly. There was a time when no one at Angels games cared enough to boo, but expectations have been raised, and the fans are not going to put up with being embarrassed again (at least not in silence). Speaking for myself, I'll confess that I turned the game off shortly after Kevin Gregg replaced Ortiz. Those innings from the top of the third to the end of the game were the first I've missed this year. And I missed them not because of a scheduling conflict, or because I needed the sleep (though I did), but because I had reached my disgust threshold.

My question, and the question of everyone in my situation, is obviously this: where is Scioscia's disgust threshold? Certainly he was quick enough with the hook last night; Ortiz started very well, but once he began his death spiral he received very little opportunity to pull out of it. In reading Scioscia's comments in today?s L.A. Times, however, I'm more than a little disturbed as the prospect of seeing him again in five days.

Ortiz earned a starting job despite his rocky spring (2-0, 6.66 earned-run average) because Scioscia liked the way he was throwing and thought Ortiz's track record - a 44-33 record over the last three seasons - warranted the final spot over veteran right-hander Aaron Sele.

This is an accurate depiction of Scioscia's rationale for putting Ortiz in the rotation. I apologize for not finding a quote from the man himself, but on several occasions he did give that reason: Ortiz won 16 games last year, so he must be good. But wins, as any of the new breed of baseball statisticians will tell you (at length, and snottily) are one of the least telling measures of a pitcher's effectiveness. In Ortiz's case last year, they were the result of a lot of run support - more than seven runs per game - and despite his effectiveness as a pitcher. His ERA was 5.20, up from 3.77 in 2002. He surrendered 209 hits in 180 innings pitched, as opposed to 188 hits in 217.1 innings pitched in 2002. His pitches per at bat went up, his pitches per start went down; his opponent's average, opponent's OBP, and opponent's slugging all went up, his strikeouts per nine innings and strikeouts per walk both went down. By nearly every objective measure, Ramon Ortiz was a worse pitcher in 2003 than he was in 2002. Except one. Except wins. In 2002, Ramon Ortiz won 15 games.

So I guess Ramon Ortiz was better in 2003 than he was in 2002, huh?

More from the Times, this actually a Scioscia quote:

"Everyone is aware of those options [replacing Ortiz with Gregg, Shields, or Sele --Sean], but what's best for our club is to give these guys the opportunity to see what direction they're going to go," Scioscia said. "Ramon is going to take the ball again."

"We feel the guys who are struggling in our rotation now are going to be real shining spots for us as the season goes on. We're going to let it play out until we feel they're not where they need to be. But it's far too early for that."

As I mentioned before, it's only too early to make that decision if you start looking at the data compiled from the beginning of the 2004 season forward. But these starts don't exist in a vacuum; they exist continuous with his 2003 season and the spring training starts he made, in which he gave no indication - at least statistically - that he's any better than what we've seen.

That's not my main complaint, though. I have enormous respect for Mike Scioscia as a manager, and I absolutely believe that he has earned some amount of trust when it comes to making these kinds of decisions. That said, I also believe in one of the fundamental tenets of argumentation: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If someone tells you they can jump sixty feet into the air, you're going to demand to see it for yourself, or to see notarized affidavits from the Pope and Judge Judy. Simply saying that "we feel the guys who are struggling in our rotation now are going to be real shining spots for us as the season goes on" just doesn't overcome what we've seen with our own eyes over the course of the last year. If Scioscia were to say "look, Ramon's had some lousy outings, but we feel he can be effective because..." and here my imagination fails me, because I can't come up with any plausible reason. But if Scioscia could somehow fill in that blank with a reason that made sense, I'd probably believe him. At this point, however, what I'm hearing is that if all the kids in the world clap their hands, and really, truly believe in fairies, Tinkerbell will come back to life.

It would be really, really swell to have the old Ramon Ortiz back. His 2002 was, without question, an excellent season, one that no one would dispute was integral to the Angels' championship run. If he could be even close to that effective, it would be worth all the frustration - even the embarrassment - of watching him run off the rails in his first few starts; I'd be the first to apologize for calling for his release (and yes, that's what I think they should do), and I'd probably even be a little ashamed about it.

There's just one problem.

There's no such thing as fairies.

Keep your hands and feet inside the car at all times 

Posted 2:53 PM by Sean
After Seattle's 14-inning victory over Oakland last night - on a balk, for God's sake - the A.L. West standings got a little bit tighter. Oakland's still out in front at 8-5, but the Angels are a game back, Texas is two back, and Seattle is three back. Get used to it.

After their day off yesterday, the Angels start a three-game home series with the Rangers tonight. Heading to the mound tonight is, of course, Ramon "You Doormat, You" Ortiz, who made his previous start against Texas into an audition, assuming someone in the stadium was looking for someone to play the role of Dresden in a World War II documentary. The day off theoretically gave Scioscia a chance to skip Ortiz, but ultimately I think maintaining the rotation right now is a good call - after all, if he's going to melt down completely, I'd rather know it sooner as opposed to later.

Now, Ortiz did have a decent start against Seattle his last time out, but it's fairly obvious, even at this early date, that Seattle's lineup lakes a certain...potency. The Texas lineup differs from the Seattle lineup in much the same way a doberman differs from a shih tzu. An old, wheezing, arthritic shih tzu. And if the Angels are going to win this one, they're going to need Ortiz to throw those first-pitch strikes, and avoid situations in which the Rangers know he has to come over the plate.

The offense is also going to have to help out. There's no question that they were pretty ineffective against Hudson and Zito, but...well, that's Hudson and Zito. Tonight, they'll be up against Kenny Rogers, and that's a whole 'nother bucket of chicken. The Angels got to Rogers for six runs in six innings ten days ago - a game Rogers won. All six of the Angels runs came in the fourth inning, and account for two-thirds of his runs given up this season - in his other two starts (both against the A's), Rogers has given up a total of three runs.

A truce while we bury our dead 

Posted 11:20 AM by Sean
The Angels have today off, so I'm not going to say much. Dropping two out of three to your major division rival at home ain't much to put one in a pontificatin' mood. I thought Colon and Escobar looked fine, all things considered, and, though Washburn's pitch efficiency was horrendous, he did, you know, win. So my sky-is-falling fears are, currently:

1. That Vlad Guerrero will continue to swing at anything at all, including the NASA's new Gravity Probe B as it passes overhead.

2. That Darin Erstad will continue to swing at outside breaking pitches, which he cannot hit.

3. That Jose Guillen's head will spontaneously explode if he doesn't hit a home run soon.

4. That Ben Weber is some sort of Samson-in-reverse, growing steadily worse as his beard lengthens.

5. That Frankie Rodriguez will prove unable to throw 200 innings out of the bullpen.

6. That the supply of batteries for Aaron Sele's Game Boy will run out soon.

For now, that is all.